Kaspersky finds more US snoops

Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs has uncovered more evidence indicating that the US National Security Agency is behind a particularly successful hacking group.

“Equation Group” ran the most advanced hacking operation ever uncovered and was untouched for more than 14 years.

Kaspersky researchers did not say that the hackers were the NSA, saying only that the operation had to have been sponsored by a nation-state with nearly unlimited resources to dedicate to the project.

However the mountain of evidence that Kaspersky provided strongly implicated the spy agency.

The strongest new tie to the NSA was the string “BACKSNARF_AB25” discovered only a few days ago embedded in a newly found sample of the Equation Group espionage platform dubbed “EquationDrug.” “BACKSNARF,” according to page 19 of this undated NSA presentation, was the name of a project tied to the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations.

“BACKSNARF” joins a host of other programming “artifacts” that tied Equation Group malware to the NSA. They include “Grok,” “STRAITACID,” and “STRAITSHOOTER.” Just as jewel thieves take pains to prevent their fingerprints from being found at their crime scenes, malware developers endeavor to scrub usernames, computer IDs, and other text clues from the code they produce. While the presence of the “BACKSNARF” artifact isn’t conclusive proof it was part of the NSA project by that name, the chances that there were two unrelated projects with nation-state funding seems tiny.

The code word is included in a report Kaspersky detailing new technical details uncovered about Equation Group.

Among other new data included in the report, the timestamps stored inside the Equation Group malware showed that members overwhelmingly worked Monday through Friday and almost never on Saturdays or Sundays. The hours in the timestamps appeared to show members working regular work days, an indication they were part of an organised software development team.

The timestamps show the employees were likely in the UTC-3 or UTC-4 time zone, a finding that would be consistent with people working in the Eastern part of the US.